Social Media Intersecting with Video Communications:
High end traditional video conferencing is a $1.5B/year market. Internet VoIP providers have been providing free voice and video chat services; however they are also entering the video conferencing market. With the advent of higher speed cellular (4G, and other wired and wireless technologies) networks and the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and mobile devices, the video conferencing market is moving rapidly to the consumer segments of the market with rapid adoption of video centric services by consumers. This will have several major market shifts. It will (i) dramatically increase number of video conference (video chat) users, (ii) drastically reduce the cost of the solutions, (iii) accelerate bandwidth use for both cellular networks, Internet and last mile networks, (iv) rapidly increase the new forms and number of video conferencing applications, and (v) increase other modalities of video streaming applications and services. These and other shifts will increase the overall video conferencing and video communications markets globally which is forecasted to be larger than $30B in the next few years.
The global reach of the Internet and its associated web services, significant increase in DSL, Cable and other Service Provider network bandwidth, proliferation of advanced mobile device, and the millions of Internet users have created both a significant opportunity and a technical problem for video based communication. The users are now demanding instant access of services from anywhere, anytime, and on any device and as ubiquitous as text or voice based services. However, this creates a significant bandwidth and quality of service (QoS) problem for video related networks and service. Cellular service providers are placing restrictions on bandwidth use through pricing plans that limit bandwidth utilization. Users are using, and will increasingly use, mobile devices to upload and download rich video based web services. This will cause significant network congestion, reduce user access to video based services, and slow down adoption of video related services.
Social Media Intersecting with Broadcasting:
As in the case of traditional video conferencing, the emergence of internet and social media and customer demand for interactivity and immediate access to customizable content will dramatically impact the broadcast industry. The Television, Radio, Cable Satellite industries are already seeing the impact of internet and changing customer needs/demands. New internet based radio and TV stations have already started to proliferate the traditional broadcast industry. Internet base music and TV/video broadcast service have already started to penetrate the broadcast industry. Customers are getting and demanding instant access to video/music customized to their specific needs and over their choices of any device whether it be TV, Computer, Smartphones, Tablets or other computational devices. In addition the global reach of the internet is breaking geographic and network boundaries. Unlike TV or Radio signals the internet is by in large accessible globally, therefore broadcast services which were once thought to have network or geographic restrictions are rapidly shrinking and customers are demanding their broadcast services form anywhere, on any device, at any time and any content.
These customer demand fueled by the possibilities of the internet have opened up previously unimaginable opportunities. These new class of services will have inherent technical barriers. The internet is not a predictable network as are the Broadcast TV, Cable or Radio networks. Just as internet voice over IP (VoIP) faced significant technical hurdles with Quality of Service (QoS) etc. when we did voice over the internet and tried to provide the same or better quality of service as switched voice. The internet based broadcast services will face similar if not larger QoS hurdles. For instance the delay, latency, synchronization of audio/video are a just a few which the industry will face. In addition to business challenges of content ownership, content rights and distribution etc.
These new internet broadcast services demanded by the customers will need to be real-time and highly interactive, highly personizable, highly mobile, very easy to manage and use and with low organizational controls—in effect the same customer needs and behavior seen in the Social Media world will be transposed on to the Broadcast industry.